Of course, Yahoo Music Unlimited couldn't live up to its title and is
coming to an end. I've been a subscriber for three (?) years and happy
with the service for the most part. My
music needs are pretty simple.
I'd like good, high-quality music from both artists that I know and new
music I've never heard. I value variety and production value over
control and nouveau taste. My music player of choice comes from
Creative and plays WMA (so no iTunes for me!) as a listening study I
performed 6 years ago put the WMA compression at the top of my list.
Yahoo
Music Unlimited gave me many pleasant hours of listening, both to their
tracks and their streaming music (the old Launchcast technology). It
was through the Yahoo recommendations that I discovered a favorite band
Jamiroquai and plenty of enjoyable music.
Unfortunately, Yahoo has decided to
shut the doors and turn their
customer base over to Rhapsody (run by RealNetworks, an unfriendly
Internet presence in my mind). It appears that Rhapsody has more content than Yahoo did, but we'll see whether it spans my areas of interest in an improved manner. I am able to get Yahoo's pricing ($143.88 at least for this first year) which is below Rhapsody's $14.99/month (which includes download to a Plays-for-sure music player). As I still remember my introductory pricing with Yahoo which was $5/month including transfer to a player, I'm not leaping for joy here.
On the plus side, I was looking to bail on Yahoo myself, but failed to research the alternatives before the last time my credit card was re-upped on its own. We'll call this 'directed research.'
I'm entering this with low expectations, so I'm bound for pleasant surprises, right? I do hope that Yahoo keeps its streaming service going. This is something they offered to the ATT/Yahoo DSL subscribers for free (free for all, but the highest quality streams were reserved for their music or DSL subscribers).